After Berta and Abby went to bed for the night, I got out my tools and ripped apart the XBox again. My goal was to put a bigger hard drive into the XBox so that I could store more pirated games information in it. This project was doomed from the start.

To replace the existing drive, you need to copy everything over to the new one. To do that, both drives must be hooked to the XBox at the same time, by removing the IDE ribbon from the DVD-ROM. The trick is that the power cable on the DVD-ROM is not the same as what you would use on a hard drive, and there are no extras inside the box like there are in a computer.

So I took one of the kitchen computers and plugged it into the wall near the TV. I then ran an extension cable to the XBox from the other side of the room. You'll ask why - The extension cable (actually both of the two short ones I hooked together) had no ground, and although the computer required it, the XBox didn't. Imagine me sitting in a sea of wires and opened computer cases. Then, I did the crazy thing: I plugged one of the power leads from the computer into the XBox's new hard drives. This is while the drive was hooked via IDE to the XBox.

Surprisingly, that worked.

Anyway, I unplugged it all, removed the old drive, installed the new one, switched the slave/master jumpers around, and everything looked good to go. It looked good.

What a mess. I don't know how many times I tried to reflash the chip bios, nor how many CDs I rewrote trying to get the new bios to take. Every time I turned the box on, it would flash the Xenium splash screen, then jump straight to the Microsoft bios. Sometimes the DVD would work, sometimes not, and I could often not get it to open the tray no matter what I tried. What the heck?

After hours of searching and rewriting and getting very frustrated, I finally realized that having sat on the controller wire caused the breakaway cable to come slightly loose. Firming up this connection made the everything work as expected. I expressed a sigh of relief after quite a few hours of toil.

In the middle of fragging the XBox, I noticed that the Xenium OS 2.0 beta is available for release. This will be pretty nice when it's finished. But there are currently warnings about not being able to re-flash back to XOS 1.1, so I'm going to hold off for a while. If this OS makes it so I can boot the XBox with my wireless controllers installed, I'll be a very happy man.